Designer-Authored Histories: Graphic Design at the Goldstein Museum of Design Steven Mccarthy
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Designer-Authored Histories: Graphic Design at the Goldstein Museum of Design Steven McCarthy This paper is based on a presentation made The idea that graphic designers could, and would, create their own in 2005 at the New Views: Repositioning histories through their writing, designing, and publishing can be Graphic Design History conference held at the found throughout the twentieth century. Whether documentary, London College of Communication. reflective, expressive, critical, self-promotional, comparative, or visionary, designers have harnessed the means of production to 1 For further reading on design authorship: state their views in print—a concept and a practice that parallels Anne Burdick, ed., Emigre 35 and 36: Clamor over Design and Writing (Sacramento, CA: most of the discipline’s growth and maturity. Jan Tschichold’s Emigre, Inc., 1995, 1996). influential New Typography, published in 1928, Eric Gill’s polemical Steven McCarthy, “What is Self-Authored book, An Essay on Typography, from 1931, and Willem Sandberg’s Graphic Design Anyway?” Design as Author: Voices and Visions poster/catalog Experimenta Typografica books, begun in the 1940s, are just a few early (Highland Heights, KY: Department of Art, examples that illustrate how graphic designers and typographers 1996). have advanced their ideas through self-authorship. Cristina de Almeida, “Voices and/or Visions” Design as Author: Voices and Visions On the intellectual heels of deconstruction, semiotics, poster/catalog (Highland Heights, KY: conceptual art, and postmodernism, and enabled by new Department of Art, 1996). technologies for the creation, production, and distribution of Michael Rock, “The Designer as Author” Eye, no. 20 (London: Emap Construct, 1996). designed artifacts, more graphic designers began to produce Rick Poynor, “Designer as Author” self-initiated work in the century’s latter decades. However, it Design Without Boundaries (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1998). was not until the early to mid-1990s that formal theories about Monika Parrinder, “The Myth of Genius” Eye, design authorship emerged. Among the tenets posited by design no. 38 (London: Quantum Publishing, 2000). authorship’s framers were redefining the design process, opening Steven McCarthy, “Tinker Tailor Designer Author” Eye, no. 41 (London: Quantum new avenues for collaboration, building stronger relationships Publishing, 2001). between visual form and literal content, expanding the space for Cristina de Almeida and Steven McCarthy, personal expression, creating a greater level of social and political “Designer as Author: Diffusion or Differentiation?” DECLARATIONS of engagement, and finding more opportunities for entrepreneurial [inter]dependence and the im[media]cy of ventures. In 1995 and 1996, in particular, Emigre magazine’s issues design international symposium web site. (Montréal, Canada: Concordia University, devoted to “Clamor over Design and Writing,“ the exhibition, 2002) http://www.declarations.ca/ Designer as Author: Voices and Visions, held at Northern Kentucky knowledge/author_1.htm (now offline). University (Fig. 1), and the Eye magazine article, “The Designer as Steven McCarthy and Cristina de Almeida, 1 “Self-authored Graphic Design: a Strategy Author,” fueled the debate. for Integrative Studies” Journal for When one considers the plethora of commercial graphic Aesthetic Education (Champaign-Urbana, design in everyday life, how might a narrowly defined area like IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002) Rick Poynor, No More Rules: Graphic Design design authorship be relevant to the discipline’s study and research? and PostModernism (New Haven, CT: Yale Before trying to answer, some background on the context for a University Press, 2003). collection of designer-authored histories follows. This essay explores Katherine Moline, “Authorship, Entrepreneurialism and Experimental a range of examples of works, held in the Goldstein Museum of Design” Visual:Design:Scholarship, Design at the University of Minnesota, that exemplify key moments Research Journal of the Australian Graphic Design Association, vol. 2, no. 2. http:// in the history of graphic design authorship. In addition, selected adga.com/au/vds/vds020205.pdf (online works will be examined that prompted debates, mainly in the design September 28, 2007) © 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Design Issues: Volume 27, Number 1 Winter 2011 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00053 by guest on 29 September 2021 Figure 1 Designer as Author: Voices and Visions poster (detail), 1996. press, about the role of the graphic designer in the professional arena, as well as the blurring of boundaries conventionally held firm between fine art and graphic design. The Museum Context The Goldstein Museum of Design at the University of Minnesota is known for its collections in apparel design, historic costume, textiles, and some decorative arts. The museum was founded from the collection of sisters Harriet and Vetta Goldstein, professors at the university in the early twentieth century and authors of the 1925 book, Art in Everyday Life.2 Their design philosophy was more Arts and Crafts movement than Bauhaus, but their proto-feminist approach elevated the design possibilities of domestic life at a time when design was largely a man’s world. The Goldstein Museum’s decision to add a graphic design collection came from several convergences, including growth in the number of students enrolled in courses in the field, as well as a robust professional community in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. The Collection, which was established in 2000, focuses specifically on objects of design authorship, making it one of only a handful of specialist graphic design collections housed in a university museum context. (Similar American collections include the Cary Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Wolfsonian Collection at Florida International University, and the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at Cooper Union.) This specialization, in itself, makes it unique in its contribution to documenting—from the mid-twentieth century to contemporary times—an important aspect of graphic design history. It is important to note, prior to listing the works in the collection, that this is a young and growing collection, an incomplete collection, and a collection that has yet to be fully exploited in terms of research and scholarship. The collection has both macro and micro qualities, as discrete works show particular examples of 2 Harriet Goldstein, Art in Everyday design authorship, while an entire run of a publication or several Life. (New York, The Macmillan publications together reflect how the larger themes of design Company, 1925). 8 Design Issues: Volume 27, Number 1 Winter 2011 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00053 by guest on 29 September 2021 authorship have evolved over time. All works position the graphic designer as subject (by designers) and object (about designers), while the graphic designs that give their ideas tangible form are as integral to their messages as the literal words. After all, as one scholar asserts more generally, “It would be far more productive if the subject of graphic authorship, superficially debated in/by the profession, were addressed in terms of its specifics—highlighting how specific designs work, at the levels of their graphical, semiotic, and ideological dimensions.”3 The works acquired include the publications PM (later A-D), Portfolio, Push Pin Graphic, Dot Zero, Octavo, Emigre, Fuse, Zed, News of the Whirled, and the complete contents of the exhibitions, “And She Told 2 Friends” and “Soul Design.” Each publication and exhibition is discussed with particular emphasis on its contribution to the concept of graphic designers’ writing and designing of their own histories. Names of major contributors have been cited because doing so expands the connections between design authorship and the designer’s involvement with the broader discipline of graphic design practice, and because it is a legitimate historical approach to credit “exceptional individuals.”4 Each work discussed below signals a shift in the ways we think about graphic design, both in terms of documenting professional practice and in how culture, new technologies, and socio-political issues have informed the history of the discipline. Because ideas about graphic design authorship were emerging in the mid-1990s, and were being debated in Emigre and Zed in particular, the collection acquires an aspect of being self-aware from that point forward. That the earlier publications hadn’t yet been labeled as works of design authorship doesn’t diminish their contributions; rather, they establish a foundation for shaping subsequent discourse. The concept comes full circle as many individual works in Kali Nikitas’ curatorial project, “And She Told 2 Friends,” were created for typical client-designer-user contexts (e.g., Irma Boom’s stamps for the Dutch postal service and Robynne Raye’s concert poster); 3 Gérard Mermoz, “The Designer as therefore, design authorship resides at the level of the exhibit, and Author: Reading the City of Signs— not necessarily at the level of the discrete artifact. The works of the Istanbul: Revealed or Mystified?” Design Issues, vol. 22, no. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Collection have this in common: They all contribute to the historical MIT Press, 2006), 79. narrative, in designers’ voices, of how authorial practice